Apart from ::gestures broadly::, I've decided to take the plunge and set up a (small) endowment fund at the NCSU Libraries Stayed there overnight quite a bit back when I was homeless (nearly 30 years ago now 👴🏼🫠) and want to give something back to them

in a real role reversal today i got to give a bandaid to a medical student at the reference desk.

Headline from Science: “U.S. government has lost more than 10,000 #STEM Ph.D.s since Trump took office.” www.science.org/content/arti...

Here’s the deal with the FY26 NIH funding bill: One line in the 1000+ pg bill = significantly less science. The increase to ~40% of grants moving to MYF is estimated to result in a 35% decrease in the NUMBER of NIH grants funded annually—moving the paylines from 10% to around 4%. THIS IS BAD.

I met an absolutely lovely academic who asked whether my department back home is affected by ICE -- a question dramatizing how little info is getting out. For the record, the small example I chose: My dept has a carpool to pick up grad students of color who can't safely commute to campus alone.

📢All updates to the guide to applying are being released quarterly ✅Version 2.7 In this update we address shared copyright, a new requirement for Subscribe to Open (S2O) journals, and clarify some wording #OpenAccess #BestPractice #QualityCriteria #Copyright #S2O 🔗 blog.doaj.org/2026/01/12/u...

In the real world, Texas desperately needs more foreign trained doctors. But in GOP world, you drive them away with bans, surveillance, and fees.  www.texastribune.org/2026/01/09/t...

[blogged] Why Ghost References Still Haunt Us in 2025—And Why It's Not Just About LLMs aarontay.substack.com/p/why-ghost-...

The Senate version of the NIH appropriations bill has language that limits the use of multiyear/upfront funding. Please call your Senators and Representatives to make sure it is in the final bill. We must stop the brain drain in our research workforce before it's too late.

Glad to see Congress doing some oversight of new NIH policies. www.congress.gov/crs-product/... Number of new awards is way down since Trump took office, despite NIH spending the same amount of money.

INBOX: Former NIAID director Jeanne Marrazzo is suing the Trump administration. She alleges the NIH violated her constitutional rights and illegally fired her after she blew the whistle on actions that jeopardized public health and violated federal law.

Such h index, very wow 📚

Headline: “Exclusive: #Springer #Nature #retracts, removes nearly 40 publications that trained neural networks on ‘bonkers’ dataset.” www.thetransmitter.org/retraction/e...

I aspire to a state of enlightenment where I can laugh at the LLM fail of the day, tsk-tsk the Altman video being tsked, and then go right back to coding w/ Claude. It's not like we're debating a policy to reduce AI use. It's more like deploring the weather, which I can do even as a user of weather.

Love it: this article argues tongue-in-cheek for a new metric that combines the weight of a researcher's published books divided by the number of years since their doctorate. It is normalised: "A kilogram of philosophy weighs the same as a kilogram of physics." www.nature.com/articles/d41...

My PNC-MLA presentation about the Pairwise PubMed Search Generator has been posted! In it, I put the tool in context and give a demo at the end. #medlibs

My PNC-MLA presentation about the Pairwise PubMed Search Generator has been posted! In it, I put the tool in context and give a demo at the end. #medlibs

I have literally thousands of spreadsheets I've built with Python and I'm showing people examples of them all the time because they're f'n beautiful

excuse me??

Hey #medlibs, I built a tool for making it easier to create proximity search strings in PubMed. Check it out! I presented at PNC-MLA this afternoon and will follow up with a link to the recording when it's posted.

Logged in to ScholarOne for the journal I co-edit and jfc we had as many submissions in 2 weeks as we used to receive in 6 months 😱 Just so you understand why journal desk rejects these days give no feedback - we just can't at this wild volume. Is it the same for other journals and editors?

This National Medical Librarians Month, celebrate their impact by exploring JMLA articles that highlight how librarians enhance evidence-based practice, advance patient care, and amplify scholarly communication. Read here: https://ow.ly/et6S50Xku0n #JMLA #medlibs #healthsciences #NMLM

Happy International RSE Day to all the Research Software Engineers in our community! 💫 #InternationalRSEDay #RSEDay2025 We feel proud that so many members of The Carpentries community are in this vital role for research. We appreciate and celebrate you today. 💙

🧪 AI models and research tools are citing retracted scientific papers, essentially using information struck from the scientific record. The fix is complex, slowed by fragmented databases, inconsistent publisher labels, and training data cutoffs. #AcademicSky #MLSky

🚨 Although we encourage researchers to add institutional emails to their #ORCID records, this article by @retractionwatch.com#ORCIDillustrates the vulnerability of relying on an email domain as the only verification source for a researcher over data from trustworthy member orgs. #Researchsky

Encouraging researchers to select CC BY as the license of choice for preprints maximizes reuse and minimizes the complexity of navigating legal terms when sharing research. Learn more about licensing preprints with CC BY: zenodo.org/records/1428...

In January 2025, life science preprint servers @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social and @medrxivpreprint.bsky.social updated their license selector, placing CC BY at the top of the list. Just six months later, the number of CC BY-licensed preprints has increased for the first time in five years.

"plagiarism" feels like such an understatement for what is going on here. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Come be my boss! We’re looking for a passionate and supportive leader for our Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology. Research in MMI spans diverse models and systems of host-pathogen interactions. Come join us in the beautiful Pacific NW! facultycareers-ohsu.icims.com/jobs/35624/c...

this just out APA Journals Policy on Generative AI: Additional Guidance www.apa.org/pubs/journal... via @apajournals.bsky.social

That feeling when you ship a feature that you've had in mind since 2015... Your Nodes can now be labeled anything, or nothing, or every node in your diagram can have the same label if that's what you want. Here's a Patreon post about it. More documentation to come! www.patreon.com/posts/new-fe...

Keep up to speed on new federal publication sharing requirements. We've organized details of polices by agency - NIH, CDC, NASA, Dept of Ed., NSF & more. Download & compare here: researchsharing.sparcopen.org/publications/ sparcopen.org

3 💡 conclusions from this @timeshighered.bsky.social piece based on @altmetric.com data: 1️⃣ Academic twitter is dead 2️⃣ Bluesky is the most promising alternative 3️⃣ There is a lot of underused 🦋 potential with many dormant (institutional) accounts #academicsky www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty...

I wish SearchRxiv felt less like a preprint server and more like PyPi.

say it again: 4 million people work in higher ed, the largest employer in 10 states, second largest employer in 10 more, and in 60 of the 100 biggest cities demolishing higher education is economic sabotage

An outright fanatic who wants to stop all scientific research

IMPORTANT UPDATE IMPORTANT UPDATE Regarding APHU/ACLU et al. vs. NIH Lawsuit

Good Scientific American story about the letters of dissent from 4 federal science agencies (to date)... www.scientificamerican.com/article/trum...

we're getting close to a point where consumer-priced computers can run models nearly as large as deepseek. cheap. not "guzzling water" or "powering a whole home every time u run a query".

One of my Sankey diagrams has been published! This was not a systematic review, but my co-authors did screen and categorize all the search results I found for them in a similar fashion. See Figure 1 at www.jpedsurg.org/article/S002...

“As I sat at home watching shoddy science, poor quality control and opaque research being published and discussed, I felt more and more inspired to become a scientific sleuth,” he says. @lonnibesancon.bsky.social

Maybe the real Ship of Theseus was the Ship of Theseus we made along the way

One could argue that the NIH was overwhelmed by grant applications *way before* availability of LLM text-processing

“The court will next address the hundreds of submitted applications NIH left in limbo. We are working to ensure those proposals are fairly reviewed and that NIH can’t bury the next generation of life-saving research.”

Creative people and people of good will who are allies and advocates for creativity need to come to grips with the fact that AI training is generally fair use for the same deep reasons that critique, parody, teaching, scholarship, and other daily creative practices are fair use.

The NIH Is Capping Research Proposals Because It's Overwhelmed by AI Submissions www.404media.co/nih-capping-...

If you're a researcher from an institution that didn't have the good taste to subscribe to Altmetric, and you have a research project in the scientometric area for which our data could be useful, apply here for free access to our data: www.digital-science.com/blog/2025/07...

This has all been changing *hourly* some days www.authorsalliance.org/2025/07/18/a...

THREAD Universities and Researchers Save The World All the Time In July 2025 Superman once again saved the world on the big screen. Luckily for us, humanity's ranks are filled with real superheroes who are saving the world every day (to less cinematic fanfare.) Here are 5 massive wins: 1/8